Dave Bakke: Bob Bartel’s Beatle backstory started in orphanage

Here is what most of us know about Bob Bartel of Springfield. He’s the Beatle guy, “Beatle Bob’ who promotes the Fab Four and, in recent years, the home in Benton where George Harrison visited his sister Louise just before Beatlemania engulfed teens around the world.

But Bob has a backstory, one that explains that he is a Beatle fan for a very different reason from most people. It starts in an unlikely way, with Bob’s birth mother putting him up for adoption in Chicago in 1949.

“I got off to a rough start,” says Bob.

Bob went from foster home to foster home until he finally landed at an orphanage administered by Catholic nuns. This was pre-Vatican II when nuns ruled classrooms and orphanages with iron fists.

“The nuns at the orphanage were very strict about everything,” says Bob. “It was run like a prison, really. It had barbed wire around it. When one kid ran away, we were so happy that one of us got away.”

Bob’s orphanage experience was just like in the movies when boys keep seeing other children adopted while they are left behind. The older they got, the less chance they had to be adopted. Bob lived at the orphanage for a couple of years and was told he might be there until he was 18 and free to leave.

“I couldn’t bear that thought,” Bob says. “I had gone to four foster families in one year. The social worker would come to the house with my little suitcase and I’d be taken away to another location, constantly being judged by everybody. Does he fit in? Does he work? Is he going to be our son?”

Instead, he was no one’s son. And no one’s brother.

But Mildred and Elmer Bartel saw something in him that they liked. They stepped up and said they would like him to be their son. As a result, Bob was taken to a Cook County courtroom one day for an adoption hearing. It was a day he will never forget for a couple of reasons. It was the day he saw his birth mother for the first time. And it was the day he met Otto Kerner, who would go on to become governor.

Kerner was the judge that day. Sitting way up on that bench, Bob said Kerner was like the Wizard of Oz up there with all the awesome power and thunderous voice of the wizard. But Kerner was kind to a 9-year-old boy scared out of his wits. He talked directly to Bob and made him feel, for the first time, that he had some control over his life.

“He said something like, ‘Well, Robert, if you decide you don’t want to go with the Bartels, you can’t go back to your mom. Over at that table is where your mother is sitting.”

Page 2 of 2 - But his mother was in the courtroom with her sister, which meant Bob still didn’t know which of the two women he saw was his birth mother. It wasn’t until Kerner addressed his mother directly as “Ann,” and she answered that he figured it out.

Kerner explained Bob’s options, which included returning to the orphanage. Instead, Bob chose to go with the Bartels.

Then, Kerner invited Bob up to the bench to sit on his lap. He opened a drawer, pulled out a sheriff’s deputy’s badge and pinned it on the little boy.

“You’re with me now,” Kerner said, “and I’m not going to let anybody hurt you. You’re a deputy just like that big man over there. With this badge on, nobody’s going to hurt you.

“You want to go with Elmer and Mildred, and I think that’s a great decision. They love you a lot and have spent a lot of time and effort to have you here in the courtroom. You are Robert Bartel from now on.”

It was a good decision. The Bartels, both of whom have since died, raised him. They eventually moved to Springfield where Bob attended Springfield High School.

He saw his birth mother one time after that day he first saw her in the courtroom. She contacted the Bartels and invited Bob for a visit and to meet his two brothers; brothers Bob never knew about until that moment. He did go, but never returned after that day.

But remember what I said about Bob’s love of the Beatles? What has all this to do with that you might ask. Only everything.

Feeling rejected by his brothers and his mother, and the only child in the Bartels home, Bob found family in John, Paul, George and Ringo. They filled the empty place in Bob’s heart where his brothers should have been.

“They saved me,” Bob says. “The Beatles were my four brothers. They became what I didn’t have. All these songs came to me as being, like, spiritual. The two brothers who wouldn’t have me? They (The Beatles) would have me.”

That feeling that the Beatles were the brothers he never had eventually led Bob to a family of his own. He met his wife, Janice, through an ad in a Beatles fanzine.

Soon, it will have been 50 years since the night the lads appeared for the first time on Ed Sullivan’s show. (I was so excited that Sunday night that my stomach hurt.) The Beatles meant something to us all. But not anything like what they meant to Bob Bartel.

Know of something quirky? Emotional? Funny? Inspiring? Dave Bakke is your man and his deadline is always near. Pitch your idea to him at dave.bakke@sj-r.com or at (217)788-1541. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. To read more, visit www.sj-r.com/bakke.